It is with some misgiving that I come here this evening to lecture to this Society on the training of an aeronautical engineer. The subject is not one which I chose myself; indeed, I think that it is probably the very last which I should have selected to talk about, but the Council of the Society, for some reason which I have not yet been able to understand, invited me to deal with it. I rashly promised to do it, but now that the time has come to redeem that promise I feel that I ought to have refused and chosen a subject on which perhaps I could speak with a little more authority. I suspect, however, that the Council was anxious to obtain a discussion on a topic which to any Society is a very important matter and that I have been put up to serve as a target for your criticism in the hope that something useful may emerge from your comments rather than from my paper.

The subject which I have chosen for my lecture this evening must be one of profound interest to all engaged in the design of aircraft to meet military requirements.

This country, with its great Empire sprawling over some three-quarters of the habitable globe and in many parts sparsely inhabited, must form an object of envy to nations cooped up within narrow confines with teeming and everincreasing populations. We therefore cannot shut our eyes to the possibility of attacks being made upon us which we shall have no alternative but to defend ourselves against, if we are going to exist and hold the Empire which our forefathers have bequeathed to us.

The next consideration which we do not require professional training in military or naval tactics to appreciate, is that the predominant and indeed possibly almost solitary duty will fall upon the aviation arm of our military forces to resist attack and carry on a war.

For the calculation of the climbing speeds of aeroplanes several methods are in use, which, as is well known, do not yield quite accurate results when applied to machines with great climbing capacities, and give rise to inaccuracies which become of greater importance with increasing climbing capacity of the plane. The climbing speed, up to the present, has not been great in respect to the forward speed used when climbing, so that for the calculation of the climbing speeds the method fairly generally used and described in the “Handbook of Instructions for Airplane Designers, ”from the U.S. Army Air Service, could be used without serious objections. It has, however, been found desirable to look for a better method for calculating the climbing speeds, owing to increasing engine powers accompanied by decreasing drag coefficients of the aeroplanes, as well as to the introduction of variable pitch airscrews.